Charles Williams

Poems can mean more than the poet realizes. It is interesting to look back on this poem, written in 2011 while I was still an Anglican, and realize that I was feeling the ‘twitch upon the thread’ that would, in a few months time, become a steady and undeniable pull toward the Catholic Church, to […]

Two years ago, as part of a friendly challenge among poets, I wrote this sonnet on (and for) the holiday of Thanksgiving. I share it again today, with renewed thanks for my friends and for the gift of language. This year, 2013, I am particularly thankful on this Thanksgiving day for the life and witness […]

How does a poem come to be? There are lots of ways, but here’s the story of one particular sonnet and how it came to be. This winter, my friends Ashley and Matthew Canter had their first son, George, and asked me to be George’s godmother, a commission I gladly accepted. In early March I […]

Over this past year I have been deeply influenced by Charles Williams’ thought, particularly his insights on prayer. I have never felt that the idea of prayer-as-request was exactly satisfactory as a way to understand human interaction with the living God. Both my own experience, and wider reading in the classics of spiritual formation, indicated […]

Poetry is a way that we can reflect on reality – both the natural world that we see around us, and the supernatural world that is, though invisible, no less real. All people are called to know Christ, who is the way, the truth, and the life; and all Christians are called to walk with […]

What does it mean to walk the way of the cross with Our Lord? Last week we looked at the opening and closing sonnets of Malcolm Guite’s sequence “The Stations of the Cross.” We started with Pilate choosing to rebel against God who made him and who loves him, Pilate who condemns Jesus to death; […]

It’s tempting to just do a quick acknowledgement of the Cross and hurry on to think about the Resurrection. Easter is more pleasant than Good Friday. But St Paul says, “if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.” (Romans […]

“Broceliande” is the last of three poems I wrote this winter that were inspired by the landscape of Oxford, England and by staying at The Kilns, C.S. Lewis’s home. One of the images here comes from my reading of Charles Williams’ poetry cycle, Taliessin Through Logres, in which the forest Broceliande mystically connects all times […]

Charles Williams was one of the Inklings and a very important thinker and writer in his own right. This fall, several of the sonnets I wrote touched on Williams’ ideas; I have selected three of them to include here. If you are at all inspired to learn more about Charles Williams and to read his […]